Online rush sure to be a cracker

This Sunday could be the busiest Christmas shopping day in Australian history – online.

Up to 1.6 million people in Australia are likely to log on to the online marketplace eBay on Sunday, according to the site. Already this year Australian shoppers have totted up $30 billion in online purchases, a study by Forrester Research has found.

An extra 3 million parcels, or 100,000 packages a day, will enter the nation’s postal system over the next few weeks, care of the 10 million people buying over the internet, Australia Post has forecast.

“We’re expecting some very large spikes," said Richard Umbers, executive general manager of parcel services at Australia Post. “We are breaking records in our distribution chain, particularly this past week. This is almost certainly the biggest week for e-commerce in Australia ever. Christmas is now pretty much digital. We have seen huge growth in the past 18 months in e-commerce."

To deal with the volumes, Australia Post has added significant numbers of staff and extra shifts at its parcel-sorting facilities, extended its opening hours at many outlets to include Saturdays, and the company’s postal contractors are delivering on Sundays.

Mr Umbers said online shopping had gone mainstream and this was the first year people were confident the internet was a viable alternative to in-store Christmas shopping.

“Previously, people’s trust wasn’t there because of the important nature of Christmas presents, but now they’re comfortable that their payment is secure and deliveries will be made," he said.

In the past year, there has been a massive uptake of mobile shopping on smartphones, according to PayPal. The online payments processor said it was processing 1000 mobile transactions an hour, up 430 per cent from a year ago. Internet-enabled phones represent 65 per cent of Australia’s domestic handset market.

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Elena Wise, acting managing director of PayPal Australia, which is owned by eBay, said online sales over the past year had outstripped the company’s forecasts and grown 11.7 per cent compared with growth of 2 per cent in traditional, offline retailing. “Mobile shopping has picked up faster than we were expecting and it’s accelerating quite substantially," she said.

Taken together, these trends point to a bumper Christmas for online sales.

Of the thousands of Australian businesses selling on eBay, two-thirds expect holiday sales to increase by about a third, said Deborah Sharkey, vice-president of eBay Australia and New Zealand.

She said the largest 2000 businesses on eBay had reported average sales growth of 38 per cent this year compared with sector growth of 12 per cent and flat retail sales overall.

Fashion sellers, in particular, were a fast-growing online category and had year-on-year growth of 24 per cent, Ms Sharkey said.

PayPal’s Elena Wise said: “Fashion and apparel and toys are huge and electronics are very big. JB Hi-Fi is doing extremely well and [electronics retailers] Kogan and Harvey Norman are having huge Christmases too."

But with online shopping habits apparently so pervasive, why the focus on this Sunday, December 11?

“This week is the week that consumers generally get their heads around Christmas being imminent," Ms Wise said. “This weekend is when they can shop online with confidence knowing their purchases will be delivered in time for Christmas.

“We know from our own experience that Sunday is the biggest day for online shopping."

Online spending in Australia is half the rate it is in the US and the UK as a percentage of total retail sales. The sector is expected to grow 12.5 per cent a year for the next five years, or between three and five times the expected growth rate of retailers with physical shops.